Byzantine Diplomacy as the Art of Illusion

In the Chrysotriklinos, the hall of the golden throne in the Great Palace of Constantinople, every object, every gesture, and every silence were carefully choreographed to produce what the Byzantines called “ekplixis”—calculated astonishment. When the ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire, Liutprando of Cremona, visited the court in the 10th century, he described how Emperor Nicephorus II Phocas received him: “Before me stood a throne surrounded by golden lions that whipped their tails and roared with a terrifying sound, while mechanical trees with golden birds sang around me. When I knelt, the throne rose toward the ceiling with the Basileus sitting on it, and descended with changed garments.” What he did not know was that those lions had been scaring ambassadors for three centuries—the same mechanism Liutprando described decades later. The Byzantine court was a labyrinth of recycled illusions, where even technological wonders were repeated as a script until they became myth. This theater was not mere luxury, but the main weapon of a diplomatic system that kept the Eastern Roman Empire alive for a thousand years after the fall of Rome.

Constantinople dawned amidst mists over the Golden Horn when the palace servants performed the most important ritual of the Empire: hanging purple silks from the walls to the sea. This daily spectacle was not decoration, but a calculated message. Imperial purple, extracted from mollusks at the price of gold, shouted without words: “We are so rich that we waste in fabrics what other kingdoms would kill to possess.” This is how the Byzantine diplomatic machinery worked: a permanent theater where every detail, from the creak of a mosaic beneath the feet to the scent of the eunuchs, was choreographed to hypnotize, intimidate, or seduce.
Among the cypresses of the emperor’s private garden, where ambassadors were invited to walk before decisive audiences, grew herbs carefully selected to manipulate perception. Wormwood to sharpen fear, pennyroyal to induce trust, wild saffron to cloud judgment. The imperial gardeners were pharmacologists trained in Salerno, adjusting the proportions depending on the visitor. When the German ambassador Gebhard of Constance asked about the delightful aroma in 1082, he was unaware that he was inhaling a mixture of lavender and belladonna that would predispose him to concede in the border negotiation.
The imperial court was a carefully oiled perception machine. When the Arab ambassador Harun ibn Yahya was received by Basil II in the 10th century, he described a ceremony that left him trembling: “They made me pass through seven halls, each one narrower than the previous one. In the last, so small I could hardly kneel, the Emperor appeared sitting on a throne that rose to the sky while choirs sang in an unknown tongue. When the throne descended, he was dressed completely differently, as though he had traveled to another world during his ascent.”
This ritual, repeated for centuries with minimal variations, was not mere spectacle. Modern psychologists would recognize in it advanced techniques of sensory disorientation and the reformulation of authority. The message was clear: in Constantinople, even the laws of physics obeyed the Basileus.
Among the shadows of the Great Palace of Constantinople, where the sun filtered through the stained glass as if hesitant to illuminate so many secrets, a diplomatic art developed that was as refined as it was ruthless. The Byzantines did not invent political lies, but they elevated it to a form of high poetry, where each silence contained stratagems and each smile hid three overlapping meanings.

The Psychological Foundations of Byzantine Diplomacy:
Byzantium elevated negotiation to an art of manipulated perception. Its central premise was simple but profound: real power lies not in what one is, but in what others believe one is. This philosophy was supported by four pillars:

• Mystery as Shield: never show all the cards. Foreign ambassadors were received by different officials in sequence, each revealing only fragments of contradictory information.
• Delay as Strategy: responses to diplomatic proposals could take years. Time worked in Byzantium’s favor, as they knew the barbarian kingdoms lacked their millennia of patience.
• The Simulacrum of Omnipotence: fictitious crises were created at distant borders merely to demonstrate that the Empire could “appear” militarily anywhere.
• The Economy of Generosity: Byzantine gold bought loyalties, but always in staged payments that turned recipients into political addicts.

The Concrete Instruments of an Abstract Game:

Byzantine diplomats and negotiators—who perfected their craft through decades and centuries of practice—used a set of concrete instruments with many illusory elements and others intended to “confuse” their counterparts and the states and nations with whom they dealt. For a long time, the Eastern Roman Empire underwent a process of military power loss, and thus had to maximize the possibilities of using other resources to remain standing against powerful enemies and unreliable allies. Below, we will look at some of the elements they relied on to maintain balance in that turbulent world.

The Diplomatic Corps: Spies in Togas: The apokrisiarioi (equivalents to ambassadors) were selected from eunuchs and clergy—groups with no dynastic ambitions who could move between courts without raising suspicion. Their training, which was intense, included, among other things:

• Memorizing 300 pages of protocols from foreign courts.
• Learning how to poison without leaving a trace (although it was rarely used, it was a “skill” available for use).
• Techniques for detecting lies by observing the tremor of hands over wine glasses, one of the many techniques used in ancient times for reading body language.

The Art of Manipulated Translation: Byzantine interpreters were masters of what we would today call “diplomatic gaslighting”:

• They changed tones of voice in translations to make foreign ambassadors appear enraged.
• They “forgot” to convey key threats until after treaties were signed.
• They invented untranslatable words that sowed confusion (such as hyperpyron, which meant both “gold coin” and “sacred duty”). A very interesting example is when the Abbasid Caliph Al-Mansur demanded tribute, and the Byzantine translator made him believe that Constantinople would send it “when the sea stopped having waves.”

The “Gifts” that Were Actually Chains: Aurim diplomaticum (diplomatic gold) followed precise rules:

• For barbarian chieftains: solid gold objects, but of crude art, to feed their greed but not their sophistication.
• For Muslim dignitaries and sovereigns: books on Greek science with deliberate errors in key pages.
• For Western powers and sovereigns: fake religious relics but impossible to verify (such as “feathers of the angel Gabriel”). In 968, Emperor Nicephorus II sent the Holy Roman Emperor Otto I a hydraulic organ that only he could play the Te Deum on—a subliminal message of cultural superiority.

Marriages as Geopolitical Weapons: Porphyrogenita princesses (born in imperial purple) were some of the most valuable assets for the Empire, and the way they could be “used” was variable and not always with matrimonial intentions, but with dual purposes. For example, the case of Theodora, daughter of Constantine VIII, who was sent to Venice not to marry, but to make the doge break his alliance with the Normans by coveting her.
Anna Comnena (whom we will discuss later for the precious information she has left us on the thinking and workings of the imperial machinery) describes in her Alexiad how her father Alexios I used matrimonial promises to delay the First Crusade by four years.

Covert Operations: The Shadow Game: Arcana Imperii (state secrets) included tactics that would make even some of the most sophisticated contemporary intelligence services pale:

• The use of warrior monks: Agents trained in monasteries on Mount Athos who infiltrated as clergy.
• Use and dissemination of false prophecies: They paid astrologers to predict the defeats of enemies.
• Economic wars: They flooded rival markets with fake gold coins containing copper (the crisargiro). An interesting example is that, in 1042, Emperor Constantine IX provoked a revolt in Bulgaria by circulating coins with his effigy… but minted with low-quality silver that irritated the skin.

Byzantinism as a Philosophy of Power:

When Mehmed II conquered Constantinople in 1453, he found in the imperial archives diplomatic manuals that were followed to the letter—adapting them to the Ottoman Empire. Today, traces of this art survive in:

• Vatican diplomacy (the “eloquent silence” of the popes)
• Russian intelligence services (the maskirovka or strategic deception)
• Modern corporate negotiations (techniques like “anchoring” and “time pressure”)

Harvard professor Edward Luttwak sums it up: “Byzantium taught the world that the true battle is not for territories, but for perceptions—and in that war, those who control mirrors and shadows always win.”

In the Archaeological Museum of Istanbul, a display case holds a skaranikon—the ceremonial hat of Byzantine ambassadors. Its wide brim cast a shadow over the face, making it impossible to read their expressions. Perhaps in this detail lies an entire philosophy of power: to rule not from the light of transparency, but from the fertile twilight of the inscrutable.

The Eunuchs Who Wove the World:

In the shadows of the imperial harem, the eunuchs of the Dolmatica School perfected the art of governing without testicles or scruples. They were the masters of ceremony in a system where:

• Treaties were written with ink that faded after five years
• Porphyrogenita princesses learned to poison with ceremonial kisses
• Some victorious generals—who could pose a threat to the Basileus—received public triumphs… and poisoned cups in private

The great Narses, that sexless old man who commanded armies, summarized the philosophy in one sentence: “True power is not in the sword, but in knowing who sleeps with whom and what secret each pillow holds.”

Without a doubt, cruelty was something taken as natural, or at least naturalized within the political public service of the Basileus. As always, everything must be understood in its time and context, even though, objectively—as we’ve seen with the Republic of Venice, for example, or the Vatican in certain periods—what was “natural” at the time may seem barbaric to us today. It is possible that the “reason of state” was not an invention of Richelieu or Niccolò Machiavelli.

The Living Books: The Library of Living Books

The last secret, kept in the Octagonal Room of the palace, was the “animated volumes”: slaves selected from childhood to memorize entire treaties and act as human books. When the emperor needed to consult forgotten clauses, these “living codices” would recite texts while performing movements indicating key passages:

• Hands on the chest: Hidden warnings
• Finger on the temple: Double meanings
• Trembling eyelid: Lies of the opponent

In 1204, when the Crusaders burst into the palace, they mistakenly burned twelve of these “books,” thinking they were common eunuchs. Thus, the knowledge of three centuries of diplomatic tricks was lost.

Language as a Secret, Both Spoken and Gestural:

The imperial chancery had developed a coded language that drove foreign translators crazy. Breaking these codes was practically impossible, and in the case of betrayal or suspicion of it, the code could be modified. They used:

• Diplomatic palindromes: Phrases that, when read backward, said the opposite.
• Supplications that were threats: “We implore your mercy” meant “We have agents in your court.”
• Eloquent silences: During Otto I’s embassy, the Basileus remained silent during three audiences while his eyes followed a water clock that no one else could see.

When Caliph Al-Muqtadir demanded tribute, the Byzantines sent him a clock that marked the hours backward. It took two years to explain to him that it was a declaration of war.

The Imperial Chancery employed four levels of discourse:

• Prophora (for commoners): Direct and simple language.
• Akribeia (for ambassadors): With deliberate ambiguities.
• Aporreta (for the court): With codes based on Greek mythology.
• Skoteinos (for the emperor): With words that changed meaning depending on the time of day or night.

When Patriarch Photius wanted to communicate that an ambassador should be killed, he would say: “The summer solstice will be particularly bright this year.” The agents knew that “solstice” meant death, “summer” indicated the method (solar poison, derived from hemlock), and “bright” specified that it should be done in public as a warning.

Gold that Burned the Hands:

The bribery system was a psychological masterpiece. It is often difficult to imagine that such creativity was invested in some things. Among the examples offered:

• To the barbarians, they gave goblets so heavy that both hands were needed to drink—making it impossible to wield weapons.
• To the Arabs, astronomical maps with errors in the caravan routes.
• To the Crusaders, “miraculous” relics that always ended up provoking disputes among them (as we’ve already seen, they were generally completely false).

In 1204, when Doge Enrico Dandolo—blind and in his nineties—demanded payment for transporting Crusaders, they offered him a chest of crystal coins. Upon touching them, his fingers bled: they were beveled like blades. It was the final straw that led to the sack of Constantinople.

The Diplomatic Zodiac:
The Byzantines elevated astrology to a geopolitical tool. Every foreign ambassador was analyzed by Syrian astrologers who determined:
Optimal day for negotiations (scorpions were received on a full moon, when their astral influence waned)
Colors the Basileus should wear (gold to accentuate authority before Aries, purple to influence Taurus)
Exact location of the throne (calculated with astrolabes to take advantage of telluric currents)
In 1045, when Emperor Constantine IX Monomachos wanted to humiliate Patriarch Michael Cerularius, he received him under a fresco of Perseus decapitating Medusa, positioned exactly where the midday sun cast the shadow of the sword on the ecclesiastic’s neck.

Resources Used in Banquets:
Diplomatic banquets were masterpieces of gastronomic illusion:
First course: Solid gold tableware for the barbarians (who would steal them and later suffer poisoning from the mercury used in polishing)
Second course: Identical-looking dishes but with opposing temperatures (burning the tongues of distracted guests)
Dessert: Iced fruits with secret formulas – the ambassador’s fruits contained cantharides to induce rambling, the Basileus’s fruits contained opium to maintain impassivity
The chronicler John Skylitzes recorded how, in 976, the rebel general Bardas Skleros was neutralized when his crystal goblet, calibrated to resonate at a certain frequency, caused his hand to tremble during the toast – a prearranged signal to his accomplices to abort the coup.

The Three Rings of Deception:
The imperial chancery divided its diplomatic game into three concentric circles:
The Outer Circle (Prokopios): where the façade of friendship was displayed – sumptuous banquets, exchange of gifts, protocol smiles. This is where official translators operated, whose strategic “mistakes” sowed discord among enemies.
The Middle Circle (Paralios): where true alliances were woven through eunuchs and merchants. A famous case was that of the patrician Simeon, who for 20 years passed as a silk merchant in Baghdad while recruiting a network of spies among the Caliph’s slaves.
The Inner Circle (Asvestos): known only to the Emperor and his general logotetes. Here, operations were planned, such as the slow poisoning of Bulgarian King Simeon, administered drop by drop on the wax seals of seemingly friendly letters.

The Art of Elegant Betrayal:
The Byzantines developed an entire taxonomy of diplomatic perfidy, and the examples are very interesting:
White Betrayal: breaking a treaty after ensuring the other party violated it first (as with the Khazar Khagan in 941).
Purple Betrayal: dynastic marriages where the bride carried poison in her jewelry (Princess Theodora and the Emir of Crete in 949).
Golden Betrayal: financing both sides in a foreign conflict until they exhausted each other (Persian-Arab wars of the 7th century).

A Legacy of Silk and Blood:
Today, when analysts study nuclear negotiations with North Korea or double-dealings in the Middle East, they are actually reading pages from the Byzantine manual. The CIA maintains a unit called “Project Balsamon” (named after the great Byzantine jurist) that studies these tactics applied to modern geopolitics.
In the ruins of the Blanquerna palace, where wild olive trees now grow, the remains of the “Hall of Double Audiences” can still be seen, where parabolic-shaped walls concentrated the whispers of the throne to the ears of select individuals. Perhaps it is the perfect monument to this diplomacy of shadows: a space where words traveled in secret, just like real power, always present but never where it seemed to be.
Today, in the halls of the UN Security Council, in the secret meetings of the G20, in private dinners of the Bilderberg, echoes of this system persist. When a modern diplomat carefully chooses his tie (the contemporary equivalent of the purple lorum), when a crucial meeting is scheduled on a Friday afternoon (psychological fatigue time), or when seafood is served at a dinner with allergic guests, the ghost of Byzantium nods approvingly from the shadows.
As Princess Anna Comnena wrote on her deathbed: “Power does not reside in armies or gold, but in knowing exactly what your enemy dreams… and then making him believe that dream was his idea.”
Today, when a Russian diplomat “loses” key documents in a Viennese café, when the Vatican issues statements in Latin with double meanings, or when a Chinese negotiator endlessly prolongs the tea before speaking, they are executing variations of the Byzantine game.
In the secret vaults of the Topkapi Museum, among the remains of the imperial palace, a mosaic is preserved showing two ambassadors smiling at each other while stabbing daggers into each other’s backs. The inscription reads: “The smile is the shield, silence the sword, patience the poison.” Three weapons that kept an empire alive against all odds for a thousand years after Rome fell.
Perhaps the final word belongs to Anna Comnena, the princess historian who saw the curtain fall: “They called us decadent while they learned to imitate us. Now the whole world is Byzantine, only without our elegance.”

Anna Comnena: The Princess Historian Who Wrote the Soul of Byzantium.

In the twilight of the 11th century, when the Byzantine Empire was struggling between crusaders thirsty for glory and Turks lurking at its borders, a woman with a penetrating gaze and a sharp pen sat in the gynaeceum of the palace in Constantinople to write the most intimate history of her time. Anna Comnena, princess by blood and historian by vocation, was a witness and chronicler of a world fading between splendor and decadence. Her work, The Alexiad, is not only an epic account of the wars of her father, Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, but a psychological treatise on power, betrayal, and the fragile threads that hold empires together.
Anna was born in 1083, in the Porphyra, the purple chamber reserved for the children of emperors. From her first breath, she was surrounded by symbols of power: the weight of the imperial diadem, the scent of incense from sacred ceremonies, the murmurs of courtiers who already speculated about her future. Her father, Alexios I, had ascended to the throne after a civil war, and her mother, Irene Doukaina, was an aristocrat of Hellenic blood who educated Anna in the classics.
While other princesses learned to embroider or serve tea, Anna devoured Homer, Thucydides, and Aristotle. Her tutor, the philosopher Michael Psellos, taught her rhetoric, astronomy, and medicine. But her true school was the court itself: a theater of intrigues where every smile hid a dagger, and every bow a conspiracy.

The Princess Who Could Have Been Empress:
For years, Alexios I considered naming Anna his successor, breaking with the tradition that favored males. The young princess, intelligent and ambitious, was educated as though the throne were her destiny. But the birth of her brother John in 1087 changed everything. Still, Anna never gave up hope.
In 1118, when Alexios died, his wife Irene and Anna conspired to prevent John from inheriting the throne. The plan failed. John II Komnenos, distrustful of his sister, exiled her to a convent in Kecharitomene, founded by his mother. There, far from power but close to memories, Anna began to write.

The Alexiad: History, Memory, and Revenge:
The Alexiad is much more than a chronicle: it is a reckoning with history, an attempt to rescue the legacy of her father and, perhaps, to justify her own ambition. Written in classical Greek, the work covers the 37 years of Alexios I’s reign (1081-1118), from the wars against the Normans to the arrival of the First Crusade.

The Keys to Her Work:
The Art of Narrative Manipulation: Anna portrays her father as a military and political genius, but also reveals his weaknesses. She describes how Alexios employed quintessential Byzantine tactics: bribery, disguise, and patience.
The Crusaders as Useful Barbarians: Anna details, with a mix of fascination and disdain, the Crusader leaders — like Bohemund of Taranto — whom she saw as necessary but dangerous allies.

A Woman’s Gaze in a World of Men:
Unlike other chroniclers, Anna records intimate details: her father’s illnesses, her mother’s tears, the palace rumors that male historians omitted.
“My father was not a cruel man, but he knew that mercy, in excess, is another form of stupidity.”
In the convent, Anna became a respected scholar. She received visits from philosophers, debated theology, and continued writing. Some historians believe she composed a second, lost work on Neoplatonic philosophy there.
She died around 1153, having outlived her brother John and nearly all her enemies. Her legacy was not a throne, but something more enduring: the living memory of Byzantium at its most critical moment.
She was the first great female historian: combining erudition with a feminine perspective. At the same time, she is regarded as a master of political psychology, with her portrayals of figures like Alexios I — her father — or Bohemund, being deep studies of ambition and power. She is also considered the voice of an Empire in transition, as her work captures the clash between the ancient world and medieval Europe.
Today, in the universities of Istanbul, Athens, and Paris, her Alexiad is read not only as history but as literature. Because Anna did not write for the official chroniclers, but for time itself. As she herself said: “Ink may be more powerful than purple, and words more eternal than empires.”
In 2021, a plaque was placed at what was once the Comnenos palace, remembering the princess who defied her destiny. Perhaps her greatest triumph was this: that nine centuries later, her words remain alive, her intrigues continue to fascinate, and her voice — sharp, ironic, profoundly human — still resonates from the shadows of Byzantium.

The “Alexiad”: The Golden Mirror of Byzantium.

In the golden silence of the convent of Kecharitomene, where time seemed to have stopped between icons and manuscripts, a fallen princess wove with words the most vivid portrait we have of the Byzantine Empire at its crucial crossroads. Anna Comnena’s Alexiad is not just a historical account: it is a labyrinth of memory and propaganda, poetry and military precision, where each line contains three levels of reading — the official, the intimate, and the forbidden.
Anna began writing around 1138, twenty years after her father’s death. She did it first as a filial act: to rescue Alexios I’s legacy from the slanders of her brother’s court and successor, John II. Secondly, it served as personal therapy: her convent exile transformed her political ambition into creative energy. She also wrote it as a political warning to future Emperors about the dangers that awaited anyone who occupied the throne.
She formally modeled it after Xenophon’s Anabasis, but her true inspiration came from Greek tragedies — especially Euripides, whose complex female characters resonate in her portraits.
The 15 books that make up the work alternate between: a meticulous military chronicle, developing campaigns against Normans, Pechenegs, and Crusaders. This was complemented by psychological portraits, such as that of Bohemund of Taranto, described as “a lion with the smile of a fox.” Erudite digressions were also included: from dissertations on ballistics to analyses of bodily humors.
Book III contains a description of the Battle of Dyrrhachium (1081) so detailed that modern military historians have reconstructed Byzantine war tactics from it.
Being Byzantine to the end, Anna introduces clues for secret reading in her book, carving several coded messages between the lines. For example, praise as criticism, when she describes her mother Irene as “wise as Athena,” but omitting her role in palace intrigues; the use of eloquent silence, dedicating, for example, three pages to a solar eclipse during the Pecheneg campaign, without mentioning her own marriage more than in passing. She uses recurring symbols, such as the double-headed eagle (showing Emperor Alexios as ruler of both East and West), in contrast to the serpent, which represents traitors.
The book contains a set of revealing passages: about the Crusaders (in Book X): “They came like a torrential rain, countless as the stars or grains of sand… but each believed himself to be the only protagonist of the story. My father used them as one uses a forest fire: containing its advance where it was convenient.”
About her father Emperor Alexios’ illness (Book XV): “The pain in his legs bent him, but never his spirit. The doctors spoke of imbalanced humors; I knew it was the weight of the empire that gnawed at his bones.”
It has sparked several controversies: it is a primary source for the early Crusades, though — as is logical — with a clear pro-Byzantine bias; it has also been accused of historical manipulation, exaggerating Norman defeats and minimizing the mistakes made by Emperor Alexios.
The original manuscript was preserved in the imperial library until 1204, when the Crusaders stole it. Today, five medieval copies survive, the best one in the Vatican Library (Codex Vaticanus Graecus 1431).
Anna wrote to glorify her father, but unwittingly created something more valuable: a testimony of how Byzantium viewed the world and itself at the exact moment it began its long decline. Her pages still smell of incense and dry blood, purple ink, and contained tears.
As she herself warns in the prologue: “This is not just the account of what was, but the map of what could return to be. Empires fall, but their mistakes are immortal.”